Solar 2Review

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A unique, calming but sometimes manic voyage through one man's universe.

By Gord Goble

In August of 2010, a 21-year old Australian dude by the name of Jay Watts (henceforth known by his mysterious pseudonym "Murudai") released through Xbox Live a game he'd developed and designed all by his lonesome. It was called "Unplugged," an odd affair in which you play the role of a plug in a sink. That's right – a plug. In a sink. In other games, you can be the ruler of the universe, the finest football player who ever lived, or a rampaging maniac. In Murudai's slightly warped world, you try your darnedest to thwart wayward vegetable peelings and be the best damn plug to ever plug a sink.

I tell you this because even before Murudai serenaded us with Unplugged, he designed and released an Xbox Indie game by the name of Solar. In Solar, you weren't a plug at all. Instead, you were an asteroid. A hunk of rock. In space. Your mission, if you chose to accept it, was to mosey about the inky blackness – and it was inky blackness – in search of other asteroids to smack into.

Sound weird? I thought so too until taking Solar's just-released successor for a long test drive and realized there's a lot more to both it and the original than a celestial bump and grind.

In Solar 2, you begin life as a lonely asteroid in a lonely universe.

In Solar 2, you do indeed begin "life" as an asteroid. No guns, no humanoid form, and no special powers except to dictate your own movement throughout the game's seemingly infinite palate of space. And that's exactly what you do as you journey forth. Using your WASD or arrow keys (or a Microsoft gamepad), you move your asteroid – depicted as more of a speck than an asteroid, actually – up, down, side to side, and any which way in an environment without borders and without time limits.

Ah, but here's where things get interesting. Should you find another asteroid that's just kicking back and relaxing, you bump into it et voila, it subtly merges into your own hunk o' rock to produce a bigger and better asteroid. Find yet another asteroid – there are plenty scattered about – and repeat. Soon, you'll have grown into quite a large asteroid that's on the verge of becoming a full-blown…planet.

Once you've evolved from asteroid to planet, the rules change. Instead of bumping into asteroids, you sidle on up to them, just close enough for your gravitational pull to bring them into your orbit. If you've maneuvered correctly, they'll begin to rotate around you, attached by the thinnest of threads. If you've been clumsy and moved too abruptly, they'll crash into you, blowing up in the process and negatively impacting your own size and durability.

If you play your cards right, which most often means scouting about patiently for a good long while and occasionally hitting the space bar to "absorb" collected asteroids, your planet grows larger and larger and eventually sprouts life forms. Granted, you can't actually see those life forms because whatever celestial body you're piloting will always remain quite small on the screen. However, the game offers unmistakable indications of life.

Star-on-star collisions generally have a fiery end.

Soon, your life forms will build little force fields around your planet. They'll launch teeny-tiny rocket ships to defend it from harm, or, because they're not the brightest life forms in the known universe, occasionally blow up stuff you don't want blown up. This is one of the more challenging wrinkles in the game – you can't control the activities of your evolving life, often to your own detriment.

With time, you'll absorb enough asteroids to morph your now-powerful planet into a star, which you can then use to attract other planets, which in turn attract nearby asteroids as moons. You'll soon have one very large, very active solar system on your hands, complete with an armada of mini spaceships that follows you around like a pack of murderous puppy dogs. You can then go marauding through the galaxy, putting the smackdown on other solar systems, or absorb parts or all of it into your star to create an even bigger star, or a combination of both.

Eventually, you'll become a neutron star – complete with an immense gravitational pull – then a black hole with an even more powerful gravitational pull, and then…well, I'm not going to spill the beans on everything now.

Along the way, you'll find that Murudai has thrown a number of individual missions into the mix, each of which is accessed via little directional arrows that follow your planetary concoction throughout its travels. That most missions are exceedingly difficult may come as a shock to those who've been cruising the galaxy sandbox style, bereft of time and speed constraints and taking advantage of multiple re-spawn options. But they'll come as welcome respite for players who prefer a more traditional gaming format.

Various stages of stars and planets readying for battle.

In one mission, you'll need a massive, fully built-out solar system and more patience than Lindsay Lohan's bail bondsman. In another, you'll need to go in lean, mean, and wickedly aggressive. Ultimately, Solar 2's missions are the kind that require timing, precision, luck, and a whole lotta do-overs. In many ways, they are the antithesis of all that you learn and all that you enjoy during the comparatively breezy universe of the non-mission game. And that – along with some rather bizarre "bosses" you'll meet along the way – does serve to keep things interesting.

But is it interesting enough? If constant, edge-of-your-seat action is what you crave, probably not. Despite its adrenaline-pumping missions, Solar 2 is more often than not deserving of the "casual gaming" label. Not that that's a bad thing. Murubia, either intentionally or not, has stumbled upon a concept here that almost defies explanation in its appeal. Simply put, it's fun, more than a little hypnotic, and surprisingly relaxing to amble across his take on the universe and do the things he's set out for us to do.

Do I wish I could somehow control the life forms evolving on our planets? Yes. Do I wish for a more complex universe through which to explore? Yes. Did I feel at the end of my long test drive a sense of repetition? Yes. Yet somehow I was drawn back again and again to lead my merry band of stars, planets, and asteroids on its way and perchance into battle.

One thing is certain: Solar 2 will not overwhelm you with its graphical prowess. It is not, after all, the product of a multi-billion dollar multinational design house. However, it does what it does very well. There's a high cuteness factor in everything Murudai draws, and though it's all seen from a distance, there's no mistaking a new planet from an advanced planet or small star from a large star or a neutron star. And certainly the game ramps up the visceral thrills during key encounters, in which planets and stars and asteroids play an interstellar game of marbles, where legions of near-microscopic spaceships duke it out for superiority, and where tiny explosions litter the screen.

Adding to the ethereal quality of the game is a sound track seemingly pulled from a planetarium laser show. This is the only major component Murudia outsourced, and he did so to Montreal-based freelance "sound designer" JP Neufeld, who came up with a spacey, new age-meets-Alan Parsons Project-meets-Pink Floyd-meets-2001: A Space Odyssey audioscape that only adds to the ambience and is often memorable in its own right.